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This close, her scent was an entire harvest. I’d caught it across a counter for two years and hated myself for every accidental mouthful. Up close it was cut hay and honey and rainwater, and it changed as she climbed, sharpened, sweetened, telling me everything she was too wrecked to say.

The nose was not the authority, but it was an excellent farmhand.

She climbed for a long while. I saw no reason to hurry. Every time she got close, I felt it arrive in her thigh under my hand, and I eased off my fingers and mouth and let it go by.

She called me things no witch should know, and I did it again. I’d waited two years. I wasn’t going to spend her in four minutes.

Her hands found my horns, but quickly gave up steering and only held on. Her voice came down to me in instructions that got shorter and shorter. Left. There. There. Until they weren’t instructions at all, just my name.

Her thigh was shaking under my palm. “Goran, I’m going to⁠—”

“You are,” I said, driving my tongue into her before swiping it up over her clit. “Been reading it a while.”

“Goran,” she breathed.

I held her open with both hands and focused solely on her clit.

She went over fast, her body one long arc, her heels locked on my back, my name coming apart until there was nothing left but sound. I held her through it she came back to me.

“Well,” she said at last, sounding like a woman rebuilt from spare parts. “No tea in the house to blame, either.”

“None.”

My not-purr answered underneath it, a chest saying out loud what the stones had spent two years whispering.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

RAIN

We agreed, over breakfast the next morning, both of us with gold or pinkened ears, that in public we would continue like we had before. We’d be a courting couple with restraint. The bells had given the Hollow enough entertainment. It would get no more from us.

The pact lasted until midmorning, when he lifted me down from the wagon on Willow Lane. I straightened his collar, and he tucked a loose pin back into my hair. Mrs. Piddock gasped and sank down on her stoop.

I went inside and sold tea.

Goran set up his wares in the market and sold fruits and vegetables.

We stopped into the tavern before heading home, taking seats at the bar, ordering drinks.

“You two,” Rufus said, pushing the coin back across the bar when Goran tried to pay for our ale. “The bells rang, farm boy. Your money’s no good for the rest of the season. Rules of the house.”

He charged me double for our second order to balance the books, however, because Rufus might be romantic, but he wasn’t a fool.

“Rufus,” I said. “My roof.”

“What about your roof?”

“I’ve been meaning to bring it up but we were busy with the festival and all. The framing’s been up awhile. Nothing’s moved since.”

He reached under the bar and came up with a seed cake on a square of waxed paper. “Mrs. Honeycake sent a tray over this morning. Try one and tell me if she’s losing her touch.”

The seed cake was still warm. Whatever Mrs. Honeycake was losing, it wasn’t her touch, and by the time I’d finished it, I’d lost the thread of what I was asking.

Goran drank his ale. His horn-bases had gone gold, and I decided that was from Rufus calling him farm boy. We finished, and Turnip took us home. I went inside to get dinner going while Goran unhitched and fed the beast.

Ginger, lying in front of the stove, radiated smugness, her trophy from the fair held between her front paws. The honey-jar sprite sat inside. Negotiations for his release had stalled because the prisoner was refusing to leave. He’d rearranged the jar to his liking, bedded down on a square of my good flannel, and now rode around the farm inside the jar, swinging from Ginger’s mouth like a lantern.

The sprite waved at me from the jar whenever I passed, and I fed him crumbs and a thimble of water.